Little Bird: a serial killer thriller

by Sharon Dempsey

  Body disposal: He didn’t hide the bodies or cover them so there was a sense that he was flaunting his crime.

  Post-offense behaviour: Is the murderer trying to inject himself into the investigation by reacting to media reports or contacting investigators? Is there a return to the primary scene? Well, they had seen evidence of this with the bird left at the scene after the clear up.

  He had called in old contacts at the office of the State Pathologist to get hold of a copy of Esme’s autopsy report. It was gruesome reading but he felt that he needed to understand exactly what his daughter had endured. It was also important for him to learn as much as he could about the killer through his methods.

  Esme hadn’t died from the blow to her head though it did significant damage. She had died through being strangled. Declan knew that the usual clinical sequence of a victim being strangled is one of severe pain, followed by unconsciousness, and then brain death. Esme would have lost consciousness due to the blocking of the carotid arteries which deprives the brain of oxygen, blocking of the jugular veins which would prevent deoxygenated blood from exiting the brain, and closing off the airway, causing her to be unable to breathe. Only eleven pounds of pressure placed on both carotid arteries for ten seconds is necessary to cause unconsciousness. The report showed impression marks where the killer’s gloved fingers pressed into the skin. The report also stated that erythema – redness – was present on the neck demonstrated in a detectable pattern. He knew from previous autopsy reports that these marks may or may not darken to become a bruise after death. Her fingernails were intact. She hadn’t had chance to fight back. The image of the penetration of her chest cavity by the branch sickened him so much that he had to take a break from reading it.

  The precise nature of the killing suggested to Declan that the killer had a fundamental knowledge of what he was doing. It was as if he understood the clinical features and had ensured the head injury was enough to stun her, slow her down and make her compliant so that he could perform the strangulation. The hyoid bone, a small horseshoe-shaped bone in the neck, helps to support the tongue. The larynx, made up of cartilage, not bone, consists of two parts: the thyroid cartilage, which is next to the thyroid gland and the tracheal rings. The killer had pressed exactly on the spot where compression was needed to induce asphyxiation.

  He heard the front door open. Izzy, had returned from the university. He could hear her set her keys on the hall table, the tap, tap, tap, of her heels on the wooden floor.

  ‘Declan?’ She called, ‘Are you home?’

  ‘I’m in the office. Catching up on work emails.’

  ‘I’ll sort out something for dinner but I’m going up for shower first.’ she replied from the hallway.

  At times Declan could feel Izzy’s pain as keenly as his own. It bothered him on some deep level that she should suffer like this. The death of a daughter, so cruel and brutal, had felled them both. Somehow, he was able to contain his grief. He kept it wrapped up tight inside of himself like a cold piece of granite lodged in his chest. His focus was still on getting who had done this. Grieving would come later. When he thought of Izzy and Lara, his heart contracted and missed a beat. The knowledge that he wasn’t alone in this desperate well of pain made it harder to bear.

  Later that night Declan downed two painkillers and a sleeping tablet. He needed something to force his mind to still itself. Dinner had been strained. They hardly knew how to talk to each other. Now he desired nothing more than to drift away and find a temporary relief in sleep. His mind had other ideas.

  After the bomb, they had fought their way back together again. Slowly their love had been diluted from a passionate certainty to something convenient and routine. The light of their love gradually faded. They had done their best to make it work and to an outsider looking in, it did. But both of them knew that family was all that was left between them. If he had given it any thought back then, he would have accepted the status as being a natural progression, parenthood and approaching middle age did nothing to flame the embers of love. But after the bomb he watched as Izzy threw herself into her work, and into caring for the girls with a renewed energy.

  His lower legs had been ‘wrangled’, that was the word the consultant used. An image of his grandmother’s mangle compressing the sudsy water out of clothes came to mind. The semtex bomb attached to the undercarriage of his Volvo, had ripped apart metal and flesh, creating a dulled symphony of explosion. He never knew how long he had been conscious for, but lying face down on wet muddy grass, he remembered the moment before the pain and horror took over, causing his mind to black out. Unable to appreciate what the bomb had done, his brain was incapable of understanding his life would be changed forever, and in ways he could not foresee.

  All the main political parties, labelling it an attack on efforts to build peace, condemned the car bombing.

  Dissidents, as far as Declan was concerned, were little more than fascists, a group whose fundamental mindset is molded rigid in the certainty of their validity, so certain they feel they have the right and a mandate to maim and kill others. In a time of political stability and an uneasy peace accepted by the majority of people in Northern Ireland, what they stood for defied logic. But Declan appreciated that it was this narrow view that made them particularly dangerous and unpredictable. It was their intolerance that galled him the most. Their inability to accept a middle ground.

  He missed his height almost as much as he missed his ability to walk. At 6 foot 3 inches tall he had possessed an easy authority that had helped him throughout his career. People looked up to him, literally. His frame was strong and wide, crafted through years of playing Gaelic football in his youth. The skills of which he seamlessly transferred on to the rugby pitch to accommodate his Protestant work colleagues in later years. He was respected, on and off the pitch, as someone who would initiate, lead but always remember he was part of a team, working as a collective whole. His role as psychologist and his Catholic background marked him out as separate. At times, he felt like a different breed all together.

  Declan was not one for introspection, but eight months of rehabilitation had forced him to think, if not analyse all that had gone before. Rehabilitation did not begin to describe the hard work and pain he had put himself through rebuilding what was left of his body. The mind was another thing all together. He had been made to speak to psychiatrists, those well-intentioned professionals who repeatedly reminded him that he had been through an ordeal, that he would feel anger, shame and grief for the life he no longer had. But he refused to be button holed. Life throws curve balls at you and the mark of a strong person is in how they deal with them. Declan wasn’t going allow himself to play the victim. His body might have been banjaxed, but almost perversely he wasn’t about to give in graciously. A fat pension and a life of watching the local news bulletins was what the majority of them dreamed of. No more back room politicking and no more front-line action. Sure, he had to make adjustments and to work bloody hard, but what else was there if he couldn’t work? He made do with private consultancy work and lecturing at Queen’s but even that took a long time to build up.

  Declan had learnt the hard way that life could have moments of pure beauty within times of desperate sadness. After the bomb, he had spent months being rehabilitated, tortured by well-meaning medics and physios who, despite his bad temper and frustration, kept on his case and didn’t allow him to wallow in his depression. There were times when he wanted to give up. Let the bastards win and just drift away in self-pity.

  Visits from his family were not always pleasurable. It was too hard to see the concern and fear etched on their faces. But sometimes they managed to lift his spirits to levels he didn’t think he would feel again. Fleeting moments that told him he would be okay. He would make it back from this godforsaken hell on Earth. Especially his girls. The first time Izzy had brought them in, he could tell they had been well warned what to expect. Their faces pale, and their eyes wide with fear, told of half-truths
and overheard conversations.

  He had joked that they couldn’t finish him off, made out that he was some sort of war hero who had crawled from the rubble of his bombed-out car. ‘They got my legs but they didn’t get me!’ he had said, smiling with as much commitment as he could muster. Esme had asked was he only ‘half a daddy now?’ He had laughed at her directness, her quick summation of events.

  But when they saw he was still daddy, they relaxed a little and Esme had happily climbed on to his bed. Lara, always so self-contained, had taken a bit of coaxing. They accepted his new status as ‘half a daddy’ quicker than he did. And more so than Izzy ever had. Now, having spent the night with Anna, he had such a moment of joy.

  Declan could remember when he first set out on his career. Psychological profiling was relatively new and there were many in the RUC who doubted its place in policing. It didn’t help that he was a Catholic, fresh in and keen to make his mark. There were plenty like that old bastard Nelson Brogan who took every opportunity to mock Declan and his statistics, profiles and graphs of probability. Dicky, he used to call Declan. When Declan corrected him and said his name was Declan, but that he was often called Deccy, Nelson Brogan replied, ‘I don’t speak the Pope’s Irish Dicky.’ Declan thought so that is how it is going to be.

  His thesis had involved the notorious Shankill Butchers. He examined the connections between mental illness and terrorism. Up until that point, the psychology of terrorism was expressed in the language of mentalisms, and theories of pathologisation. He was looking at behavioural psychology, and the connection between an individual engaging in terrorist activity and developing a mental disorder. Certain stressors that occur because of terrorist activity, could result in psychological disturbance in terrorist individuals. These factors could explain terrorist group instability and how it should be taken into account when detaining and interrogating terrorist suspects. All theory and trajectories that the government was hoping to use to their advantage. The Shankill Butchers were thought to be the case to prove the point.

  There were plenty like Brogan who didn’t want a snotty nosed graduate interfering in their police work. For Brogan, the job of the police force wasn’t to understand the criminal mind, just to bang them to rights.

  Declan opened his eyes and estimated from the dim blue light behind the curtains, that it was not yet 5.00 a.m. He had eventually drifted off.

  Sleep was a necessary torture. Sometimes he craved it as respite from the pain of life. Other times he thought if he could survive without it, he would gladly give up the mockery of retiring to bed and tossing and turning through the night, catching wisps of sleep, before it was acceptable to abandon all notion of sleep and rise again for another day.

  He reached over to check his phone out of habit. No new messages. The house was quiet. Izzy was probably still asleep. He hoped she was, that she could find some rest even if it was induced by a sleeping pill. He wished he could offer her some comfort; some sort of acknowledgement that he understood her pain too, but the gulf between them was as wide and deep as the Atlantic Ocean.

  His thoughts lingered over the case. He found it easier to think of it in work terms. It was the only way to keep the grief dampened. Work terms. That phase played around his mind. There was something about the murders that made him feel that the killer was familiar with police procedure. It wasn’t only that the crime scenes were relatively clean. There was so much information online these days that anyone could ask Google to fill them in on protocol and how to leave no clues. There was something else. The selection of the victims. Both born in a new era of a post troubled Belfast. They represented the hope and prosperity previous generations had been denied. Had someone been trailing Esme? Had they known her every move intimately? Had his whole family been watched? The questions tormented Declan until he could take no more.

  He reached for his phone again and hit the number.

  ‘Anna,’ he said, ‘I’ve a theory.’

  24

  Anna and Thomas were itching to get Finnegan into the interview room. There was enough of a dodgy whiff about his businesses to make him worth pressing on; businesses, owned by holding companies, properties in untraceable names, planning applications for buildings that were never finished and re-zoning of plots of land inexplicably free for development when once they were out of bounds. It was clear he had friends in high places with the city council planning office in his back pocket. There was enough to justify calling him in and to see how he reacted to questions about his relationship with Esme.

  Anna followed Thomas along the pale green painted concrete corridors down to the interview room. The whole station was buzzing. They had at last brought a suspect in and even if Anna had doubts about Finnegan’s part in Esme’s murder, she wasn’t going to pass up interviewing him. Right now, she wanted to focus all her energy in getting the most out of Finnegan and seeing how he reacted under pressure.

  The Belfast Telegraph’s front page had forced their hand. ‘Dead Prom Queen’ was how they had described Grace Dowds and they were quick to point to Stephen Dowds’ political campaign last year as being bank rolled by Finnegan.

  Rory Finnegan could be connected to both victims. Anna could remember her instant dislike of him, his slimy manner and his arrogance, but that wasn’t enough to bang him up. If she cuffed every misogynist she came across there may be a shortage of men.

  Finnegan had come in prepared with his solicitor, Paul Murphy, a notoriously sharp man known for his big cases and ability to weasel his clients out of anything. Thomas had told her of Murphy’s reputation, how he was well known for conducting his business in the best restaurants in Belfast, and how he was considered the best by Belfast’s most disreputable crooks.

  ‘Murphy,’ Thomas said nodding as they entered the room. The solicitor nodded a greeting in return. He was dressed for the part with his white, crisp shirt cuffs showing beneath the wide pinstripe suit sleeve, finished off, Anna noticed, with gold cufflinks in the shape of a rugby ball. Next to him Finnegan looked like a carbon copy. They both had the same arrogant pose, sitting well back on their chairs as if being called into a police station was of little concern. A waft of cologne, a woody and pine fragrance was hanging in the room. Anna guessed Murphy was the culprit. He looked like the type to splash it on too heavily.

  ‘My client wishes it to be noted that he has voluntarily offered to assist you with your enquiries and to point out that he is free to leave at any time should he so wish.’

  ‘Duly noted,’ said Thomas taking his seat and staring at Finnegan.

  ‘Officers, what can I do to help you?’ Finnegan asked opening his blazer button as he moved forward in his chair.

  ‘For the record we’re detectives, Mr Finnegan,’ Anna said placing her folder on the table in front of her. ‘We have asked you to come to discuss your relationship with Esme Wells, among other things.’

  Thomas leaned back in his chair, mirroring Murphy’s body language, letting Anna kick things off, as planned.

  ‘Mr Finnegan, you are in property developing, isn’t that right?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Business can’t be good these days for property developers. People are still cautious after the recession.’

  ‘We deal with student rentals and high-end properties. The students have got to rent somewhere and the recession didn’t harm those who were smart enough to cushion the blow.’

  ‘So, what’s your business model then? Do you build houses, sell them or rent them out?’

  ‘All three on a good quarter. I buy anything that I think I can turn into a good profit plus I have some properties that I rent out, and some we manage for others.’

  ‘Sounds like you’re raking it in. Good for you.’ Thomas was playing it well, taking on the role of us lads in it together. He continued, ‘Hard to make a quick buck flipping houses these days though. Aren’t I right? Not like it was before the crash. But no worries, we’ll come back to your business dealings.’ Thomas made a flou
rish of shuffling Inland Revenue headed paper.

  ‘Would you say your relationship with Esme was good? You two were particularly close?’ Anna asked.

  ‘Yes, we were close but I don’t like what you’re implying.’ he stared at Anna, his grey eyes piercing, cocky, as if he was so sure of himself that he was daring her to go further.

  ‘We have Esme’s phone records. They tell us she called you a fair bit in the days leading up to the wedding. Would you normally have so many calls from her?’ Thomas asked.

  ‘What can I say, we’re a close family, so we are.’

  Anna considered this, from what Declan had told her there was no love lost between him and Finnegan. She decided to change tack. ‘Esme worked for you on a few occasions, waitressing, isn’t that right?’

  He looked at his lawyer. ‘She stepped in to help out a couple of times, yes.’

  ‘You recognise this girl?’ Anna placed a photograph of Carly in front of him. He shook his head.

  ‘For the record could you answer, please?’

  ‘No, I don’t know the girl in the picture.’

  ‘So, you’ve never met her?’ Anna asked.

  ’I can’t say if I have or haven’t but she doesn’t ring any bells.’

  Anna leaned back on her chair, ‘Let me jog your memory. This girl, Carly is her name, worked for you, at one of your little soirées. She was able to tell us the nature of your parties and name a few of your guests too.’

  Rory’s face was unreadable, as if he’d known this was coming and he’d prepared himself. Silence. Anna could wait all day. Let him sweat in his own juices a bit.

  After a moment, he says, ‘What can I tell you? They were business meetings. There’s no law against entertaining associates.’